Donate today to keep Global Voices strong!

Our global community of volunteers work hard every day to bring you the world's underreported stories -- but we can't do it without your help. Support our editors, technology, and advocacy campaigns with a donation to Global Voices!

It took bloggers to expose the hoax by pointing out that the sunrise on the TV monitors in Tiananmen Square was part of a tourism commercial that plays year round, regardless of the time of day or level of pollution. Even then, many news outlets refused to retract or correct the initial erroneous reports.

The episode isn’t just about shoddy reporting on one inconsequential story, several netizens debated. They said it reflects a bias that many Western journalists have toward China and other developing countries: to always believe, and report, the worst. As Immense_Rainbowman posted on Reddit:

The western media love any kind of story that puts a bad light on China. It's part of the whole current anti-China sentiment that has risen steadily since China's economic growth. An easy follow-on from the anti-communism sentiment from the last generation.
The narrative is that life is terrible in China, and it's to distract the Western population from our own troubles, where quality of life is taking a downturn because of recession and debt.

Another Reddit user, “wetac0s,” added: “never trust any news about China from Western media.”

How the story got started

The story originated in the UK's Daily Mail on January 17. James Nye, a Daily Mail reporter who lives in New York, wrote:

The smog has become so thick in Beijing that the city's natural light-starved masses have begun flocking to huge digital commercial television screens across the city to observe virtual sunrises.

The futuristic screens installed in the Chinese capital usually advertize tourist destinations, but as the season's first wave of extremely dangerous smog hit – residents donned air masks and left their homes to watch the only place where the sun would hail over the horizon that morning.

The article was accompanied by four photos from Tiananmen Square, the iconic plaza in Beijing, which does indeed feature gigantic TV monitors. One of the pictures showed a sunrise being displayed on a screen, with the caption, “Virtual sunlight”.

There were signs from Day 1 that something was amiss. Shortly after the Daily Mail put its story online, a reader, Cole Ranze, posted a comment questioning its veracity:

To be fair, the billboard with the image of the sun is clearly displaying a tourism advertisement for Shandong province, no doubt just one of many in a string of beautiful images meant to illustrate the beauty of that region. I think this article is a bit misleading, to be sure.

But it wasn't until January 20 that the blog Tech in Asia definitively exposed the Daily Mail report and the stories it spawned as a hoax. Under the headline “No, Beijing residents are NOT watching fake sunrises on giant TVs because of pollution,” editor Paul Bischoff called the entire story “complete bullshit”:

In truth, that sunrise was probably on the screen for less than 10 seconds at a time, as it was part of an ad for tourism in China’s Shandong province. The ad plays every day throughout the day all year round no matter how bad the pollution is. The photographer simply snapped the photo at the moment when the sunrise appeared.

Bischoff chastised news organizations that were so eager to carry the Daily Mail fabrication without checking the facts. “International media should be embarrassed for not taking even a moment to second guess the Daily Mail, one of the least reputable news sources in the UK,” Bischoff wrote. He added:

Shame on any media that ran this farce. China has its problems, but they have proven themselves far too eager to criticize just to attract hits from the shock factor. Beijing pollution is bad enough without the added dishonest sensationalism.

… and it rippled through the blogosphere. On the same social media platforms where the sham earlier circulated, correction alarms sounded.

“Well, we’ve been duped,” an environmentalist in Washington, D.C., posted on his Tumblr. On a blog ordinarily devoted to video games, a man called the initial Daily Mail story “disingenuous.” And a UK political blogger, Tom Pride, noted that “Daily Mail story about sunrises being shown on big screens in Beijing was made up.”

The bigger story: failed media ethics

Of course, the belated corrections will never catch up to the initial falsehoods. As the 19th-century preacher C.H. Spurgeon once said, “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.”

Even now, only a few outlets that ran the fake sunrise-on-TV story, such as Time, have pulled or corrected it.

But the issue is far bigger than one false news report. It speaks to the state of media ethics, or lack thereof.

“How do relatively respectable outfits like Time, HuffPo and CBS jump onboard with circulating fake stories? Simply by not checking, for one,” reporter Gwynn Guilford wrote in the online business publication Quartz. Her article was titled, ”Westerners are so convinced China is a dystopian hellscape they’ll share anything that confirms it.”

To many reporters, if the meme fits, they'll go with it, no questions asked. In this case, the Daily Mail concoction fit the impression many Westerners have of China.

“And by interweaving the themes of pollution and the government’s Orwellian-tinged attempts to control daily life, the Daily Mail offers a double-whammy of Western reader stereotypes about China,” Guilford wrote.

That enticed other publications to serve up the phony story to their readers as well.

“This isn’t the first China lie that gets picked up and broadcast by Western news media. Mike Daisey’s fabricated NPR story on ‘This American Life’ comes prominently to mind,” wrote Patrick Lozada, managing editor of the news and culture blog Beijing Cream. The headline of his post was “Why the Fake Pollution Billboard Story Matters.”

Many countries besides China get this treatment.

Earlier in January, U.S. news outlets breathlessly claimed that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had his uncle executed in December by stripping him naked and feeding him to 120 hungry dogs. That report originated in a sketchy Hong Kong newspaper, was picked up a paper in Singapore and then burst into American media.

However, the story clearly was fraudulent, according to Max Fisher of The Washington Post. He listed several tip-offs, including: The initial story had no sources; and the media in China and South Korea, where reporters are most knowledgeable about North Korea, ignored the report.

“But all of this raises the question: why are so many people – and so many major U.S. media outlets – still willing to treat this implausible story as plausible?” Fisher asked.

A blog called Pacific Side then aggregated substantial evidence that the fed-to-the-dogs story was fed to the media as satire on Weibo, China's microblogging service.

For many news consumers, the episode said more about the media's behavior than Kim Jong Un's:

The media also likes to report that Xi’an’s terra cotta “army” was built by the “tyrannical and bloodthirsty” first emperor of China – Qin Shi Huang – to “guard him in heaven.” And it appears there is no way that bit of foolishness can easily be shut down either. Here’s the real story about the world’s greatest peace maker and nation builder: http://tinyurl.com/897kb6p

Ferdie Mostert

Watching and reading all the negative media publicity on China is actually very sad. From an African perspective and someone traveling to China regularly it makes me understand why people in all non-western societies are resistant to believe anything coming from western media. Just an injustice to the world in total when someone is not doing their work properly or releasing something negative. It only causes division that breaks down relations instead of building through positive factual information. There are several negatives and problems in every country and we should be helping each other overcome those. We need to learn from history and grow up to make the world a better place. There are enough real issues to be dealt with. At the moment the Africa China relationship, with all its past faults and shortcomings, starts to grow into a positive and strong network that will benefit both continents in the long run when supported with wisdom.
Africa, China and several other regions will have to learn to ignore most of the negative media publicity from the west and focus on what is positive to ensure their relationship growing even stronger. The western world has more than enough of their own problems to keep them busy. @AfricaChinaLink

You may have a point about western media bias etc, don’t get me wrong, but IT’S THE DAILY MAIL!! EVERYTHING in it is rubbish, I would be very surprised if you found ANY good journalism in there!

wotingbudong

Yes, the Daily Mail is a tissue of lies and junk news, sadly it appears to also be the most visited online ‘newspaper’. I’m sure its readers get off on it’s stories, gives them a sense of moral superiority.
That said, I’m in my Beijing office right now looking at the Kerry Hotel, less than 500m away. The AQI is reporting between 461 – 504, which is Hazardous. There is a very real issue here.